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disinformation
Trump Ban on European Disinformation Opponents Decried as 'Authoritarian Attack on Free Speech'
"Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?" asked Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner now barred from entering the US.
Dec 24, 2025
European Union leaders and others around the world this week condemned President Donald Trump's administration for imposing a travel ban on a former EU commissioner and leaders of nongovernmental groups that fight against disinformation and hate speech—or, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them, "agents of the global censorship-industrial complex."
Rubio said in a Tuesday statement that his department "is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies."
The five people barred from the United States are Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; Clare Melford, another Brit from the Global Disinformation Index; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of the German group HateAid; and Thierry Breton, a French leader who helped craft the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) as a commissioner.
"Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?" Breton wrote on X—a social media platform that belongs to erstwhile Trump ally Elon Musk and was recently fined €120 million, or $140 million, for violating DSA's transparency obligations.
"As a reminder: 90% of the European Parliament—our democratically elected body—and all 27 member states unanimously voted the DSA," Breton noted. "To our American friends: 'Censorship isn't where you think it is.'"
As Anda Bologa, a senior researcher with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, explained earlier this year, "the DSA tackles illegal or demonstrably harmful activity—terrorist propaganda, child sexual abuse material, and foreign-backed election meddling." The 2022 law also "mandates that platforms publish transparency reports on takedown requests, justify their decisions, and offer users appeal mechanisms."
In a Tuesday statement, the European Commission said it "strongly condemns" the US travel ban, adding: "Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe and a shared core value with the United States across the democratic world. The EU is an open, rules-based single market, with the sovereign right to regulate economic activity in line with our democratic values and international commitments."
"Our digital rules ensure a safe, fair, and level playing field for all companies, applied fairly and without discrimination," the commission continued. "We have requested clarifications from the US authorities and remain engaged. If needed, we will respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures."
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted the statement on X, and various other EU leaders shared similar messages.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that "the entry bans imposed by the USA, including those against the chairpersons of HateAid, are not acceptable. The Digital Services Act ensures that everything that is illegal offline is also illegal online."
"The DSA was democratically adopted by the EU for the EU—it does not have extraterritorial effect," he continued. "We intend to address other interpretations fundamentally with the USA in the transatlantic dialogue, in order to strengthen our partnership."
The German campaigners, Ballon and von Hodenberg, said in a statement that "we will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression."
French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that "I have just spoken with Thierry Breton and thanked him for his significant contributions in the service of Europe. We will stand firm against pressure and will protect Europeans."
Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International—which supports the DSA—wrote on X: "Now the US is sanctioning a former EU official and several heads of NGOs monitoring hate speech and disinformation—on the ground that they are censoring American speech! Laughable. Social media platforms must be regulated. Better and more. Not less."
Due to Brexit, the DSA notably does not apply to the United Kingdom, but that didn't spare the two UK campaigners targeted by the Trump administration. A spokesperson from Melford's group told the BBC that "the visa sanctions announced today are an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship."
"The Trump administration is, once again, using the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with," the spokeperson added. "Their actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American."
Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey running to return to the House of Reprentatives, called out the State Deparment he previously served in under the Obama administration for sanctioning leaders of groups "that flag instances of antisemitism, harm to children, deep fakes, and vaccine disinformation online."
"Most Americans want online platforms that are safer for our kids, with less hateful and harmful content," he added. "It is not censorship to urge social media and AI companies to enforce their own rules against these things! The State Department's action is a blatant attack on free speech."
Earlier this month, the US advocacy group Free Press released a report detailing Trump's "war on free speech" based on "more than 500 reports of verbal threats, executive orders, presidential memoranda, statements from the White House, actions by regulators and agencies, military and law enforcement deployment and activities, litigation, removal of website language on .gov websites, removal of official history and information at national parks and museums, and discontinued data collection by the federal government."
The report says that "while the US government has made efforts throughout this nation's history to censor people's expression and association—be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress—the Trump administration's incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive, and escalating."
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The ‘COP of Truth’ Just Normalized a New Kind of Climate Denialism
The new denialism no longer bellows about hoaxes; it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay.
Dec 02, 2025
Belém promised a “COP of truth.” What unfolded was a courteous unravelling of ambition, as denialism left global climate action wobbling at the moment it needs steel.
As the Chair of the UK’s COP30 youth delegation, I realized within hours that this United Nations climate conference would be defined by its optics—not its outcomes. The venue teemed with political hopefuls more interested in cameras than commitments, and with a record 1,600 fossil fuel and 531 carbon-capture lobbyists, 1 in every 25 attendees served commercial interests.
Then came the negotiations, where delegates quietly diluted the science. References to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), long regarded as the global lodestar of climate knowledge, were either softened into ambiguity or dropped altogether. Several companies went even further, trumpeting improvements in emissions intensity as if they were genuine reductions.
It was greenwashing par excellence, a polite fiction to excuse keeping emissions exactly where they are.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it.
So it was no surprise when the negotiations titled toward erasure, governing not just the deal but the language that framed it. The term “fossil fuel” vanished from the final Belém Political Package, replaced with sweeping and unenforceable vows to renewables and adaptation funding.
We should have foreseen how settled climate science would be twisted and spun. After all, one investigation found more than 14,000 pieces of COP-related disinformation in just the three months before Belém. Much of it was generated by AI, including a widely shared fake video that showed the host city swallowed by floods.
This version of climate denialism reveals the moral credibility of climate action is being leveraged to keep emissions frozen in place. It no longer bellows about hoaxes, except by Donald Trump who has happily dragged America back into isolationism. In the diplomatic world it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay. It is denialism wearing the mask of governance, and it is far more corrosive than the loud bluff it replaced.
The timing could hardly be worse. The IPCC’s carbon budget for a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C will vanish by 2029 if emissions continue at today’s pace. This is also the first year after the Global Stocktake that mandates governments to draft national plans that will set our course until 2030.
And what happens now determines the shape of the decisive decade. Crossing 1.5°C sharply raises the risk of irreversible cryosphere collapse—rapid ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland which will lock the world into meters of sea-level rise that imperil coastal megacities across every hemisphere. At 2°C, another billion people will face severe water scarcity—especially in the Global South where adaptation capacity is lowest and exposure is highest. This reality is why the deliberate sidelining of climate science is not just exasperating but catastrophic.
And COP30’s lone nod to honesty—the Declaration on Information Integrity—feels painfully thin. The declaration, which promises to counter climate falsehoods, was only signed by 12 countries. And with no sanctions or accountability, it is a gesture at truth in the exact moment truth needed teeth.
We need a global firewall for climate truth: binding rules for climate information, a UN body capable of verifying data with transparent AI, and legal duties on platforms to curb the algorithmic spread of lies. Climate inaction is becoming a matter of legal liability. That burden should fall equally on those who deliberately twist the science.
There must be a counterweight capable of tracing disinformation, naming the culprits of confusion, and dragging the debate back to the science that anchors it. Only then can we hope to restart global climate momentum. And in an irony worthy of our age, the technology that helped generate the mess—AI—may be the only thing sharp enough to cut through it.
According to Sachin Dev Duggal, Britain’s foremost expert on applied artificial intelligence and EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023, the internet is now a space where reliable information sits beside convincing fabrications, and no amount of earnest climate communication will fix this without tools that can separate accuracy from invention at scale.
AI is already showing what those tools might look like. It can review millions of words in seconds and test claims against established climate data with a consistency no human team can match. We are already seeing this in practice. For example, the machine-learning model ClimateBERT has analysed corporate reports and exposed misleading emissions claims. Another model, CLIMINATOR, has also been trained to hold political and corporate actors to account by checking whether their climate statements align with the evidence or contradict it. And the FactCrisis project, cofounded by the EU, has used AI during heatwaves to track false statistics and identify accounts pushing them, offering a glimpse of what becomes possible when AI and international bodies finally start reinforcing one another.
Duggal argues that the next step is a decentralized verification model. Climate data from satellites, sensors, and national inventories would sit in a shared public ledger that no ministry or corporation can quietly revise. When a government or company makes a claim about progress, anyone could check it against a record that does not bend to convenience. It would make the small acts of creative reporting that feed climate denialism far harder to get away with.
Yet today’s AI carries a flaw that limits its usefulness. Large language models are fluent but ungrounded, reproducing the language of climate science without retaining the facts that give it weight, which makes them unreliable referees in a space awash with motivated distortions. Duggal sees that any serious AI tool must reconnect claims to their evidence, trace where the data came from, and reveal the steps that turned information into a conclusion. This is the direction of his SeKondBrain project, which concentrates on how to build these evidential scaffolds so that an AI system can point to the exact documents, numbers, or assumptions that shaped its judgement. That kind of traceability matters because it gives climate negotiators and regulators something concrete to interrogate. And without systems built to preserve and expose the evidence behind their outputs, AI will remain too opaque to play any serious role in protecting science.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it. Without that basic partnership, we may have reached the point where another COP has nothing left to say.
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Killing Climate Lies That Kill
This game of lies started decades ago with big oil and gas corporations, long before “fake news,” disinformation and misinformation were a thing. It's only gotten worse.
Nov 14, 2025
Blatant lies are putting the people and our planet at risk. Often told for profit or power’s sake, they hurt economic, environmental, and social standing of most of us at the expense of a few. In this nasty game, those who strive to expose the truth and stand up for progress pay the steepest price. And they are environmental activists, journalists, scientists, and ordinary citizens defending their communities.
This month, two pivotal global summits happen that could bring change. In Bangkok, Thailand, the International Civil Society Week brought together over a thousand citizen activists from around the world. In Belem, Brazil, COP30—the global climate conference—will see governments, businesses, scientists, and many others negotiate. Citizen activists and civil society may finally have a say there. The last three climate summits held in countries where there’s little democratic freedom and heavy reliance on oil production shunned them.
To fight the lies that stall progress, Brazil has launched a Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change at the climate summit. The civil society week declaration calls strongly for both climate action and ending disinformation. Global civil society leaders like Oxfam, ActionAid, and Greenpeace as well as hundreds of grassroots organizations from Afghanistan to Zambia have endorsed.
However, buzzwords like disinformation and lack of information integrity, in their sophistication, often dull the impact. Perhaps they feel inauthentic. We need to think outside the box to engage in more authentic conversations involving people with diverse viewpoints.
For starters, let’s call false information what they are, lies. Lies that pervert the progress, hurt the many, and kill those who speak up. This game of lies started decades ago with big oil and gas corporations, long before “fake news,” disinformation and misinformation were a thing. What has gotten worse is that they are now blatantly colluding with governments and political leaders around the world to protect their short-term gain.
Those who stand to lose the most in the game are ordinary folks, especially those who struggle to make a daily living or don’t have the resources to defend themselves.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t only about “social justice.” The climate lies stall economic growth. The United Sates, once the global champion of the free market, is today doomed to become uncompetitive. President Trump, sponsored by American oil oligarchs blatantly lied at the United Nations earlier this year. His claims that renewable energy is dangerous, expensive, and unreliable will hurt the economic progress of the United States and the world.
He attacked countries making progress on renewable energy. The narrative of lies leads to decisions and bullying of nations and communities. When Trump raised tariffs against solar panels made in Southeast Asia, workers lost jobs. This includes Thailand, where civil society week was held.
Examples are many from Trump and other regimes. Russian bots, European and Australian leaders, too, have spread lies about the unreliability of renewable energy, including false threats of job loss and a rise in commodity prices. China, despite being the global leader in renewable energy, attacks environmental activists.
The lies kill. In the past decade, over 2,000 activists have paid with their lives for speaking up and standing up to protect forests, rivers, and community resources. They stood up against coal and oil extraction, mining, logging, land grabbing, and large-scale development that destroyed communities.
Civil society and activists who speak up get labelled foreign agents or eco-terrorists. They are arrested, harassed in public and in courts, and bullied online. This is despite their efforts to try to protect us. Every year, climate disasters, worsened by fossil fuels and harmful developments, kill tens of thousands and displace millions. The lies kill both blatantly and silently.
For the lies and bullying to end, we must engage in an open, honest, and empathic conversation. We need to have dialogue with diverse viewpoints. And this is not easy because all of us are burdened with our daily struggles and comfortable with information consumption habits. Hearing difficult truths and contradicting points of view are stressful.
Civil society, movements, development organizations, and media are losing relevance and trust among the general public. We have failed at listening, speaking, and interacting with farmers, women workers, students, young men, doctors, and business folks. Yes, we do speak up, but well-intentioned campaigns often end up merely preaching to the choir.
We get likes on social media, signatures for petitions, and like-minded folks at street protests. But that isn’t enough to build empathy and build a majority movement, even with those who are most likely to suffer from climate lies and bullying. To connect with people and come together with people, we must first care about who they are. As agents of social change, it is not just about playing to an audience but taking care as an ethical duty.
At the same time, we must shout out at the big fat liars, Big Oil, and their colluding partners in media and politics. Citizens, journalists, movements, and governments must stand for science, reason, and progress. This means urgently demanding an end to fossil fuels and moving to green energy while also protecting communities at risk during the transition. We must also defend the activists who stand up for our rights and the planet.
More of us must act today and stand with those who do. The argument for collective demand and action for climate progress isn’t just moral. Let’s call it collectively selfish–it may just improve our health and economic and social well-being.
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